Sofia Hultquist AKA Drum & Lace on Red White & Royal Blue, Dickinson and 3D Audio

July 16, 2024

Soundtracks, Scores and More Staff

“It’s the two houses, whether it’s in Malibu or Venice, the pink one and the dark one, the Barbie and the Batman, and I feel like that’s very much my musical palette…”

BY JASON LAZARCHECK

 

Drum & Lace has been busy at work on a new record titled ONDA, the artist’s second solo album, which came out June 21 on Fabrique Records.  While Drum & Lace’s music is hard to categorize, the genre the artist has been inhabiting is ambient techno, and IDM and minimal dance are both inspirational to this new album.

Sofia degli Alessandri-Hultquist is the composer, sound artist, and performer known as Drum & Lace, and last summer she challenged herself to make the most of the industry shutdown and write the original music that she wanted to. She could’ve just said, “Oh well,” and done nothing.

Instead, literally on May 2, the moment the WGA went on strike, I was like, “All right! I’m going to write my record, from today until the day that I go on holiday, and I’m just going to do this.” It’s just been so good mentally, to be focusing on this, as a choice. Instead of just sitting around [saying to myself], “Oh, I so stand in solidarity with everyone, but am I ever going to work?” That whole thing that I’ve seen a lot of friends fall into. Because it’s hard to keep positive when certain parties aren’t agreeable.

Sofia has been working hard, keeping positive, and rising to the occasion her whole career. Her determination and love of life formed Drum & Lace and helped make Sofia an accomplished Hollywood composer.

 

 

Drum & Lace has worked on TV series and films involving everything from Victorian poetry and vampire parties. The artist has also co-composed shows and movies with Ian Hultquist. As husband-wife collaborators, Sofia and Ian co-scored the TV series Dickinson, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Good Girls, and movies such as Night Teeth and Rosaline.

Most recently, Drum & Lace scored the horror film Cobweb, starring Lizzy Caplan and Antony Starr (Lionsgate), and also Red, White & Royal Blue, a romantic comedy about the son of a US President and a British prince (Amazon). Both movies made big splashes but in very different genres, and the two projects demonstrate the diversity of Drum & Lace’s musical palette. 

It’s the two houses, whether it’s in Malibu or Venice, the pink one and the dark one, the Barbie and the Batman, and I feel like that’s very much my musical palette…

Sofia’s approach to the scoring doesn’t change that much, even though the creative process varies project-to-project.

Some you get brought on when it’s a script and you’re able to write suites and write things for the director to think about while he’s on set. There’s other projects, like Red, White, & Royal Blue, where they had an assembly cut to show me, and they did reshoots and things changed but at the same time, I was brought on when they’d already shot and the structure of the film was set.

It depends on the project. Sofia enjoys being brought on early, because writing music from a script and having conversations with a director before they shoot is helpful creatively.

Going back to using your imagination instead of being stuck on: “This is what it looks like. What does this mean to me?” And that happened on Cobweb, another movie that came out. It happened on a slasher that I worked on called They/Them. I was brought on before they shot. Those projects are always great because I’m able to write these suites of music that are purely based off feeling. And sometimes they worked great. Sometimes they don’t. More than anything, being able to have that feeling on set, while they’re shooting, I think informs everyone and helps with that process. But it’s always different.

It sure is, especially when Drum & Lace is scoring a horror movie the same year as a romcom. There are two sides to Drum & Lace as an artist. Dark and light. Moody and melody. Spook and pop. Sofia relates these two sensibilities to a meme she keeps seeing of two iconic SoCal beach homes, side by side.

It’s the two houses, whether it’s in Malibu or Venice, the pink one and the dark one, the Barbie and the Batman, and I feel like that’s very much my musical palette… The Dickinson and Red White & Royal Blue and Rosaline, they all feed into this ABBA, Spice Girls, super-pop, house music, club music, mainstream love of harmony and melody and ear-worms. And then on the other side, there’s all the more esoteric, Bjork, Radiohead, weird experimental music, and I think that very much has parallels with [my other] scoring… My personal music that I release is sort of in the middle but more towards the darker.

The sooner you can figure out how to be yourself within this job, I think things just become much easier.

Whether Sofia is inhabiting the more experimental and esoteric black house, the poppy, pink house, or both at once, this duality makes Drum & Lace’s sound unique among today’s TV and film composers. Sofia attributes her success in music to simply being herself.

 

The sooner you can figure out how to be yourself within this job, I think things just become much easier.

Sofia spent her formative years doing just that. Figuring out how to be herself as an artist. Initially, growing up, she never imagined a career in music or film. Long before Drum & Lace began scoring films in Hollywood, young Sofia degli Alessandri was growing up in Italy, and if you encountered her there, chances are she’d be singing.

I feel like I have been singing for as long as can remember. I literally, when I was young, would make up songs. I would be singing anything I heard, whether it was on the radio. Or our car. When I was growing up, it had cassettes. I was just always singing. I don’t know why. I don’t know where it came from. It’s just always been a part of what I do.

I was lucky enough that my grandmother was a huge classical music lover… I think it was maybe her escape. Now that I’m older, I wish I could go back and ask her but she passed away nearly a decade ago. And so she had a piano at her house, and I think it was in 2nd or 3rd grade, it became very important to her for me to start taking piano lessons.

There wasn’t necessarily a singer in the family, or even a musician. Sofia’s parents both worked in finance and banking. And both parents were extremely out of tune. Sofia credits her grandmother with introducing her to great music.

I was lucky enough that my grandmother was a huge classical music lover… I think it was maybe her escape. Now that I’m older, I wish I could go back and ask her but she passed away nearly a decade ago. And so she had a piano at her house, and I think it was in 2nd or 3rd grade, it became very important to her for me to start taking piano lessons.

Young Sofia started and learned some basics on the piano. Looking back, she doesn’t know how much real musicianship really emerged then, but between those early lessons and the fact that she was singing all the time, Sofia became the “music person” at her relatively small school. A big fish in a small pond. That’s how she initially found her way, from piano and singing as a child to an acoustic guitar in middle school. And then from there she took from drum lessons and had a drum kit, jamming with friends.

My first actual formal musical training was I joined a music academy in Florence, where I’m from, and started taking my first actual singing lessons. Like solfège and scales. And once I started doing that and taking some theory classes, that’s when I was like, “OK! I really enjoy doing this.”

But Sofia didn’t think about music as a career. Not yet. Just as an escape. Although music had been around her as long as she could remember, she wasn’t sure it was a viable thing. Living in a small city, a small pond, Sofia, like her grandmother, used music just to entertain herself and those close to her.

Florence is beautiful but it’s so small when you live there 18 years, so I just couldn’t wait to leave… It’s a beautiful place to vacation and I appreciate going back, but it really just didn’t have a music scene. The charm about it is it’s stuck in 1550. It’s just like Renaissance Disneyland. It just felt so limiting.

Teenage Sofia wanted to escape, but kept she music separate from her ideas of what she’d end up doing with her life. She thought she’d go into biology, and maybe she’d become a vet. As devoted to music as she was, she was also busy playing soccer.

There was a lot of indecision. There was a lot of options. The summer, it must have been between 10th and 11th grade, we took a big trip to the US, so we went to New York and Boston. And while we were there, we said, “Why don’t we see some colleges?” So we went to see all of the Ivies, which I mean, I didn’t get into, whatever… I think I may have fooled my father into walking in front of Berklee… “Oh! Look! Maybe we should check this out.” And we went to an info-session for prospective students and I remember my father falling asleep.

Her jazz vocal teacher had gone to Berklee College of Music, but Sofia didn’t think she wanted to do music professionally, until she visited the school. Her biggest takeaway from that campus tour was how she felt so seen and understood by the students and admired what they were talking about. It was eye opening. She applied to Berklee early decision and got in. When it came to music, she had convinced herself.

It’s as if everyone is me from my hometown, and we all showed up… “Oh, everything makes sense now.” All the things that had been hard for me socially and in terms of what I’m like, once I got there it just felt like I connected to so many people in a different way.

“Well, I guess is what I’m doing.” And my parents were sort of like, “Well, OK. This is just for now. Then you’ll go to real school eventually, right?” Oh course, that never happened either!

Sofia made her escape to Boston to pursue her dreams. The people at Berklee were the type she never found in Florence. All musicians. Creatives. Experimental and supremely talented.

It’s as if everyone is me from my hometown, and we all showed up… “Oh, everything makes sense now.” All the things that had been hard for me socially and in terms of what I’m like, once I got there it just felt like I connected to so many people in a different way.

She made lifelong friends at college and even met her husband there. But Berklee was also a huge challenge. Sofia went in wanting to be a vocal performer. While she’d done music theory classes as electives after school, her music education didn’t compare to those students who went to performing arts high schools and emerged with vast knowledge. 

So I got there and Berklee, I guess it makes sense but it’s somewhat cruel, they have a testing system, at least they did, where they rate you on all these different things. And I remember getting rated so low. Not as low as you can, but really not great. And as an overachiever, I remember that was a real slap in the face and a real wake-up that it was not going to be easy. 

Fortunately, Sofia loves a good challenge.

That drive has gotten me where I am, because music has never been easy for me. I think for people who are virtuosic players, when it comes easy, maybe you don’t push yourself as hard? So yeah, I’ve been pushing through since then!

She pushed herself as hard as she could as a vocal performer, but after the first year, Sofia found out that she was not cut out to be the performance major the way that she wanted to be. The people that were in her classes were absolutely exceptional. It humbled her. But she was determined to make the most of this experience at one of the world’s best music schools.

I was so far from home. I was 6,000 miles from home. My parents were paying for me to be there. And I really didn’t want to leave… So I just started looking around.

And she found film scoring. Still, she didn’t see film as a viable career path, just like she’d initially thought about music itself. Not yet.

Growing up, however, Sofia always watched a lot of movies. And as a child in the countryside, she cultivated her imagination out in nature and did a lot of free play outdoors.

Just exploring. And I think that does a lot for the imagination when you’re young, and you start to imagine scenes, and that you’re in a specific place, whether it’s a movie, and on top of that I’d be singing. And there was this thing I used to do where I’d be singing, and if the wind caught up, I would be like, “Oh my god, it’s all happening!” You know, there would be all these fantastical moments that I’d just relate to all of this… I realized I can write music for films, when in theory I’ve been singing songs about my life, about what I see, my whole life, so it felt like something natural.

Sofia saw classic Italian films on television. Cinema Paradiso. Fellini movies. But she didn’t necessarily see herself in the most well-known composers: John Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Bernard Herrmann, and Hans Zimmer. When she entered the film scoring program at Berklee, the profession was less diverse and democratized. There wasn’t anyone she had seen as a model or a mentor for the career path. The more she explored film composing, however, the clearer it became how it combined so many of her passions.

Again, it was very hard, because I’d never taken an orchestration class, and to this day I think my style of writing is not really very traditional, so I struggled with fitting within the box you need to learn things in. Once I realized how to break that box, it was great, but having to fit within the confines of that was tough…

One way she broke the box was with pop. The pink house. The use of pop melody in scoring is a distinctive element of Drum & Lace’s sound. And Sofia’s love of pop goes all the way back to the first songs she sang and is also linked to her late mother.

Gianni Morandi and Fabrizio De André. All of these 70s and 80s singer-songwriters, which still to this day if I hear some of the tracks, especially the more summery ones, they take me right back… And then that was a gateway to literally Spice Girls.

So my mother was Finnish. She was a Swedish Finn. She passed away when I was young. And she loved ABBA, so I listened to ABBA when I was young. So definitely ABBA. And my dad, in my dad’s car there was always a Blues Brothers tape from the movie.

Most of all, when she was young, Sofia listened to Italian pop.

Gianni Morandi and Fabrizio De André. All of these 70s and 80s singer-songwriters, which still to this day if I hear some of the tracks, especially the more summery ones, they take me right back… And then that was a gateway to literally Spice Girls.

Sofia was the perfect age for the Spice Girls. She was 8 to 10 years old when the first record came out, and she was all about that. Late 90s pop certainly informed the way that she writes now, and so many of the projects she’s done with her husband, Ian, have had that pop sensibility.

 

What began with ABBA and the Spice Girls, however, soon shifted to more experimental darker music. The black house. Sofia found Radiohead and Bjork and went completely the other way. She also turned away from the classical music her grandmother introduced her to, like many kids do. Verde, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Mahler… Sofia did the typical rejection thing, thinking, “Ugh, no, it’s so stuffy!”

Now, a composing student, she began to combine the sounds she grew up with into her own sound. Light pop melodies, darker experimental sounds, and classical too.

You need to learn the foundation of something in order to do your own version of it. But I think that it’s really hard once you’re studying something like Beethoven or Mozart and you’re learning about “this type of chord goes to this chord,” it’s then hard to un-train yourself [in order to say], “But I can write whatever I want.”

Post-grad Sofia composed music for indie shorts and documentaries. She worked as an in-house composer until finally decided she had accumulated enough knowledge and enough tools in her tool belt to go out and try to be freelance and do music full-time. So she found a way to further hone her voice as a composer, make a name for herself, and also make some money. A rather fashionable way.

Working with fashion was a means to an end… At the time, I was living in New York City, and I was trying to figure out how I was going to be freelance and write music, but I can’t just expect to just score a movie. Coming from not having connections anywhere… OK, what can I do to build a reel for myself? Get some experience. And, on top of film and music, something I’ve always been in love with, which I think is very cultural in Italy, is fashion. So, whether I realized it or not, there’s such an appreciation of that and of textiles and leather and all that in Florence where I grew up.

I worked with a designer whose inspiration for her whole collection for that particular season was The Little Prince… “OK, so what chapters of The Little Prince can we explore and what themes and what sounds?” And that was really exciting because it was like film scoring, but when you’re doing a fashion presentation they’re in person. 

This was a unique time in the fashion industry in New York, because there was excitement and funding and many initiatives with Fashion Week, and Sofia made the most of it. It was right before Instagram got huge. What Sofia did at the beginning was just cold-call and cold-email all these designers.

“Hi. I’m a musician. And I would love to write music for you, whether it’s for a fashion film, if you’re doing a fashion presentation, whatever you might need music for.” To this day even, a lot of the music for fashion is just hiring a DJ and they pre-decide the mood or whatever and that’s kind of it. But at the time, I didn’t feel like there was anyone doing bespoke music for them, and there’s a big reason why you’d want to establish a sound for yourself.

In addition to the creative identity of a signature sound, licensing a Rhianna song is out of any emerging designer’s budget, so Sofia was essentially offering to compose music for less money that could be tailored to the colors of their season and the inspiration behind the new clothing line.

I worked with a designer whose inspiration for her whole collection for that particular season was The Little Prince… “OK, so what chapters of The Little Prince can we explore and what themes and what sounds?” And that was really exciting because it was like film scoring, but when you’re doing a fashion presentation they’re in person. 

By the time Sofia moved to LA a few years later, she did the same thing, but by then she’d acquired the skill to use a camera and edit footage, so she was able to go up to designers and not only offer to write music but make a whole fashion film for them. She wrote a lot of music this way and had the mindset to keep the rights to it all. So she’d essentially built herself a music library just by retaining all her rights for the fashion projects, plus she had a reel, since it was music-to-picture. 

It was very legitimizing, in a way. I wasn’t making a ton of money, but I was having a great time. And had some great clothes. Because a lot of times they’d be like, “Well, we can pay you half in clothes and half in cash,” and I’d be like, “OK!”

Sofia’s work in fashion led her to a documentary feature about the that very industry called The First Monday in May. The film’s director, Andrew Rossi, worked with Sofia’s husband before on other documentaries and thought of her to co-score it. That was her first composer credit and her and Ian’s first co-score together. The doc was the perfect mix for Sofia because of her background, and in scoring it, she was able to reach the next level as a composer.

Like so many of her initial plans for herself, however, reaching the next level as a composer didn’t happen exactly how she thought it would. Sofia had to find her own way: through a solo album.

The summer that I released my first EP as Drum & Lace was a summer where I felt like I’d given so much to doing the fashion thing and I think First Monday in May had come out, and it was just one of those things… When you start, a lot of people do a project that maybe goes to a festival or does something a little bit more significant and you just expect, “OK, here we go. This is the beginning of my career. Here we go.” But it’s such a naive way of thinking, because by the summer after, I was in a low place with myself… “Oh, why am I not getting any work.” And then you start with the “oh, maybe I’m not good enough.” And all the spiraling of whatever.

The way she got herself out of that spiral of self-doubt was to write the first Drum & Lace EP. It was the purest reflection of who she was as an artist. She mostly wrote it for herself. DistroKid had just started and she shared it there.

I literally just dropped it… “Hey, everyone, I put this random dark electric Italo-electro-thing out. And people responded to it. And all of a sudden it was, “Are you going to play shows?” …That’s really how Drum & Lace as an artist started. It was seeing an opening for it at a moment where the scoring stuff wasn’t working… It’s always a matter of finding a creative way out.

Once again, Sofia did it. She challenged herself and made the most of her time and found a way to truly be herself, with her first EP as Drum & Lace.

The score, it’s all sort of produced like it’s pop. It’s kind of contemporary music. It’s great we had that skill. Because then we worked on a movie called Rosaline, which continued that thread. And there we wrote background instrumentals for cover songs that we redid with the Renaissance pop ensemble that we worked with. But it really is playing on our strengths, our early influences.

After that first solo record dropped, Drum & Lace co-scored several more documentary features with Ian, including The Gospel According to André and At the Heart of Gold: Inside the USA Gymnastics Scandal. Then came a huge leap for both Sofia and Ian.

Dickinson was one of the first shows on Apple TV. The series was Sofia’s first real prestige project, and the biggest Hollywood gig for her and Ian at that point. Ian had done a TV show before, but it was validating for them both, a morale booster, and a confidence booster.

I remember exactly where we were, because we were in Miami, because I was doing some performances adjacent to Art Basil and we were in this rental AirBnB, and I remember they wanted to Zoom with us, and we were like, “Wait. Did we just get this huge project, that came out of nowhere?” And it was exciting.

Somebody at Apple trusted Sofia and Ian enough to hire them on Dickinson. And somebody was right. But again it wasn’t easy. On a TV series, the schedule is demanding and the writing process took some getting used to. Sofia and Ian didn’t find the tone for Dickinson right away. Sofia recalls working with Alena Smith, the creator-showrunner.

Talk about imagination and creativity, but I think this was her first time showrunning, and she now has a much better way of talking about music, but she kind of came to the project [saying], “I don’t really know how to talk about music. I’ll know what works when I hear it, but I can’t really tell you what doesn’t work until I hear it.” So it was a lot of experimentation, and if you listen to season 1, and then 2 and 3, there’s a definite musical progression. As the collaboration got stronger and the confidence of everyone got stronger. I think we were so nervous and elated when we were working on the first season, I don’t know if I remember a lot of it. It was just such a whirlwind. But it was extremely exciting.

 

 

The sound they found for Dickinson, a period dramedy, brought together a lot of both the pop and classical music of Sofia’s childhood with strong melodies and themes. 

The score, it’s all sort of produced like it’s pop. It’s kind of contemporary music. It’s great we had that skill. Because then we worked on a movie called Rosaline, which continued that thread. And there we wrote background instrumentals for cover songs that we redid with the Renaissance pop ensemble that we worked with. But it really is playing on our strengths, our early influences.

Sofia’s love of singer-songwriters and her experience as a vocalist also played a part in the storytelling on Dickinson, when they worked with a cast member in season 2 on a track called Split the Lark. Sofia and Ian essentially adapted that Emily Dickinson poem into a song that one of the characters performed live in the series.

The way that a project like Dickinson has been able to shape my sound and the way that I sound and how that has grown has been really great. And all the way through to Red, White & Royal Blue. You don’t realize it until you see the through line, and [then] it all makes a lot of sense. All the projects I’ve ever worked on and all the projects Ian’s worked on, they all come from somewhere at the beginning where the seeds were planted. And it’s like all these different petals growing out. 

Sofia doesn’t approach TV and film with much of a differentiation. Lately, in addition to her solo record, she’s been preferring working on film because she can work more thematically, in a story bundle, whereas with a TV show, she might not develop a theme for a character until much later in the season, and then it’s harder to backtrack. But for her, going into it as a composer, it’s sort of the same thing. Just different genres. Pink versus dark. 

There have been more dark features than pink ones, starting with Deadly Illusions, Drum & Lace’s first narrative feature in 2021.

This extremely campy horror movie, which honestly is one of those great watches with a bottle of wine and popcorn… It’s absolutely bananas.

Sofia feels that it’s easier for her to write dark, droney, scary music than it is to write happy music, and she’s not sure why. Drum & Lace’s darker side has contributed to scary shows like I Know What You Did Last Summer and more horror movies, such as They/Them and Cobweb, which Sofia thinks might be her favorite score she’s ever done, because she was able to get so much out of that type of horror movie music in terms of palette and instruments and mood. She looks forward to doing more horror.

Sofia even has one more distinct musical aspiration: 3D audio. This was one of the things she studied when she did her masters, and she’s really interested in it. Essentially, 3D audio performing or doing things in multi-speaker formats.

 

Whether it’s surround sound, now Atmos has been the big buzzword for a lot of things, “quad,” quadrophonic. I’m always, in the back of my head, [thinking], “The moment I can get funding, I want to do an art-sound installation.” That’s another thing that kind of keeps me up at night or if I ever start to drift and think about things… “This would be such a cool place to do an installation or to do whatever.”

Unfortunately, to put a project like that into motion right now is difficult because it’s so expensive, and it’s hard to do as a hobby for the same reason. Sofia thinks there will be a time in her career where she’ll have the opportunity to do that and on her own terms. But right now she doesn’t think mainstream audiences are ready for 3D audio. 

But it’s something that I find very interesting. 3D audio and the acoustic of sound. And I think that again feeds into the love of nature because it’s about recreating environments or having some sort of sociological impact.

Yet another Drum & Lace duality: cutting-edge technology and the natural world. A love of nature transpires a lot in the artist’s work, and Sofia herself has a desire to be in natural environments. It stems back her to childhood playing outdoors. 

We’re just kind of seeing what she gravitates towards… So many things are coming full circle with parenting, which has been very interesting.

Now Sofia has a child of her own at home, and as parents, she and Ian are sharing music with their young daughter and watching their child play and explore. During infancy, Sofia played a lot of Mort Garson’s Plantasia, music from the 70s centered around nature and plants. Now their daughter is 3.5 years old.

She is very drawn to pop music and to a lot of the same sorts of things that I am. Whether or not she understands what’s going on in a Lady Gaga song, but she loves Lady Gaga and she loves Beyonce. She loves these strong performer women… We were trying to do a lot of different genres and at home we played a lot of different things, but the things she really resonates to is the more upbeat poppy stuff… And she loves to sing. Surprise, surprise. 

Sofia knows her daughter is really lucky. In her and Ian’s studio, they have drums set up and there’s guitars and keyboards. Their daughter loves to play with the knobs on the modular synths. As a little kid, she has access to things that Sofia didn’t have till she was 18 years old. She and Ian will see where it leads. They’re not pushing anything on her.

We’re just kind of seeing what she gravitates towards… So many things are coming full circle with parenting, which has been very interesting.

Including ABBA. They were visiting Sofia’s brother in Geneva and happened upon an outdoor concert. The band did an ABBA medley, and Sofia’s daughter couldn’t get enough.

She lost her mind. I was trying to hold her and she was dancing. And it was way past her bedtime. It was 9:30pm.

Sofia’s mother shared this pop music with her, and now Sofia shares it with her daughter. As the child grows up, she’ll probably gravitate toward the darker music too.

Drum & Lace will continue to explore and inhabit both these musical spaces in order to write distinct music and tell compelling stories. And, as a composer and artist, Sofia, the woman behind Drum & Lace, will continue to be herself.

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